The Trouble with Memory
Well, I am five days short of going an entire year without writing about my art. It’s a practice that only felt complimentary to my art, but now I think it might actually be vital to my growth as an artist. That without this pause to reflect and recoup, I may be in my own way in regards to developing my work.
SO. Let’s go.
I recently purchased a book called “Spring Green” because I loved reading it as a child. I couldn’t precisely remember the plot, but I did know that I was always waiting for the color red to show up. As I remembered it, the book was illustrated with only greens, yellows, browns, and oranges. No blue, for some reason, but it wasn’t missed. Whatever was happening in the book, the animals (specifically a bear) was looking for something red and eventually, they find it. It occured to me that my affinity for always using deep orange/red in my painting might stem from this memory, or at least the memory was a symptom of my relentless desire to use such a juicy, alluring hue.
This weekend, the book came.
Cover, Spring Green
I was right to think that the plot centers around a hunt, but it wasn’t something red. Danny, a bright yellow duck, had been invited to a party where all guests must bring something green to celebrate the start of spring. He searches and searches, refusing obvious choices in lieu of something “special”. He encounters a badger, a fox, a bunny, but not once does he seek council from a bear. In fact, no bears are to be found in the entire book; sheesh! At one point, Danny finds a shiny green balloon, but is dismayed to realize it’s attached to a cat named Samantha. As a child, hearing my name in public was my favorite thing in the whole world. How could I have forgotten this detail? Eventually, Danny gives up and walks into the party with his buddy, a frog named Ricket, who also couldn’t find any novel green item to take to the party. When they walk in, everyone is tickled to see that Danny’s green thing was, in fact, Ricket. “Danny is the winner! Ricket the frog is the prize-winning green!”
Well slap my ass and call me Sally. I was CERTAIN this book was all about the color red. I was certain there was a tight, restricted color palette that forced the reader (or looker, in my 4 year old case) to crave a pop of red amidst the sea of greens. I romanticized this book as the genesis of my love of red in art. And I was so, so wrong. But how?
Maybe memory is not “bible” (thank you Khloe Kardashian circa 2013), meaning it’s not the end all, be all true recorder of human experience. Perhaps memory is more about a reduction of actual happenings, combined with the feelings we took away from the experience. “Spring Green” was not the book I remembered, at all, and I would have sworn in a court of law that I knew that book inside and out. But the seductive quality of searching for something, a color in this case, was the cornerstone of the book. The satisfaction of finding the green thing existed in my memory, but the color was wrong. I remembered a blurry version of the book and, overtime, I clarified qualities of the book with my own desires, sensitivities and preferences.
I appreciate this experience because it mirrors how I typically create a body of work. Currently, I am creating grid inspired work based on one very simple thing, “Goodnight Moon'“. Not the content or the story, but the color palette. Only coincidentally is this also a children’s book, but the thing I love about it is not the book-ness of it, but rather the feeling it evokes by simply looking at it. I want to dive into those colors, fuss over them. I want to reduce my understanding of “Goodnight Moon” to the most basic, most important elements. No fluff, no complication, just pure aesthetic obsession. It’s akin to listening to a new song on repeat for days at a time and then never listening to the song again, except slower, with more reverence.
So, this is what it’s like to be an artist and be wrong about a children’s book you read 32 years ago. It’s never just “oh that’s funny, I was wrong”. It’s a full blown existential crisis, a questioning of the basic laws of memory. And I hope to have many, many more. I hope life continues to surprise me, confuse me, and make me dig deeper into what it is we are actually doing here.
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